Bluestem is getting a kick out of Dale Lueck's ability to change his mind--and the vigor with which he defends the weather vane of his own enlightened consciousness.
Take this bit that the Brainerd Dispatch's Zach Kayser reports in Wagner, Lueck verbally duel on pre-K and climate change:
She also criticized him for voting against an amendment acknowledging climate change.
"Climate change is happening, and if we don't recognize that, then we're going to be in big trouble," she said.
That drew a rebuke from Lueck.
"We've got real work to do down there, rather than make platitudes and statements about whether we think climate change is happening," he said. "I'll be the first to tell you point-blank—and I learned this from my granddad, and my great-granddad—climate change is a real thing. It's been a real thing for centuries, for thousands of years. So let's get over this kind of political gamesmanship about whether you believe in climate change or not. You have to be completely unrelated and uneducated not to understand that we are under constant climate change, and we've got a duty to be careful about protecting that."
Wagner shot back that Lueck's words contradicted his votes.
"It's interesting that Mr. Lueck says in person that climate change exists, yet voted to not acknowledge it," she said.
She added that Lueck wasn't taking environmentalism seriously.
Jeepers. Who knew? Strib columnist Jon Tevlin, for one, in a column written back when the vote was taken in April 2015, Minnesota House says: 'What climate change?':
On the front page of Tuesday's newspaper, a headline read: "As summers get hotter, humans get more blame." This idea is being accepted as fact by most scientists around the world, by businesses and by government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense.
Even the pope seems to be down with it.
But apparently climate change is still not accepted in the Minnesota House.
The issue came up during the omnibus job growth and energy affordability finance bill discussion on the House floor last week. It was one of those debates that make you slap your forehead — and wonder how some of our elected representatives even found their way in to work that day. . . .
Rep. Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, offered an amendment that stated plainly that the Legislature believes that climate change is indeed happening, and that human activity is one of the causes. She said that 97 percent of scientists agreed on the issue, and cited increasingly hotter weather patterns, and drought and flooding across the state that has cost more than $400 million.
You'd have thought she had asked the members to agree that the state bird was a feral pig.
Granted, it was likely a bit of theater designed to get members on record or diving for cover. British Comedy troupe Monty Python used to call the bit "Spot the Looney."
Hortman said she raised the issue because the Hou
se energy bill "repealed or otherwise neutered every progressive energy policy that Minnesota has passed since the early 1980s." . . .
Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, said that the very next day the same House passed a bill legislating that these members will have the final say on complicated, scientific, water quality levels set by pollution control experts. . . .
Oh good.
For more on Lueck's flexibility, check out Metro Mark, Mpls Paul & Big City Smith savor rural broadband funding more than Dale Lueck.
Photo: Dale Lueck, against climate change being real before he was for it.
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